Scratch tickets are very well known and are widely used by lottery organization and also for drawing all kinds of prizes. These “scratch tickets” are so called because they are covered with a layer, or layers, of opaque materials that hide text printed on the surface of the ticket that tells the buyer or player whether or not he or she has won. In these types of tickets one or more winning numbers or combinations are covered with a waxy like material. It is then merely necessary to scratch these covered portions to discover if the number or combination is a lucky one. The buyer or player in a variety of ways, including fingernails, knives, coins or the like, scratches off the surface.
In practice, a coin or a knife is used to remove the waxy like substance. This is not always practical and is certainly not convenient. On one hand, if the buyer cannot find the coin or the knife immediately, this means that the person buying it have to wait to arrive at home before scratching it. On the other hand, if a device would readily be available to scratch the covered number or combination, the distributor of the tickets would face the possibility of selling many more tickets or coupons to unlucky buyers. Moreover, gripping a coin to scratch is awkward, and may cause certain parts of the hand to become fatigued, especially since the pressure must be channeled through the limited area used to grasp the coin. If the pressure could be more evenly distributed over a larger and soft surface, and throughout the hand, this discomfort could be avoided.
A number of devices of varying effectiveness have been developed to aid in removing the surface or coating. These range from simple manual scrapers in which a scraping edge is manually brought into contact with the coating while the ticket is pulled past the edge, as typically described by Rizzo in U.S. Pat. No. 4,793,061 to large, complex electrically powered devices, using a rotating brush or the like to scrape away the coating as typically described by Forrest in U.S. Pat. No. 5,402,549. With the simple device of Rizzo, the plastic scraper blade will wear rapidly and great care must be used in scraping to remove only the coating and not damage the underlying symbols. On the other hand, the Forrest device is large and expensive, must be carefully aligned to remove only the coating, and is likely to damage the symbols if the ticket should jam in contact with the rotating brush.
Other manual scrapers are described by Fox in U.S. Pat. No. 5,419,004 and Diba et al. in U.S. Pat. No. 4,777,693. These also require careful application of just the correct amount of pressure on a scraping blade assembly to fully remove the coating while avoiding damage to the symbols.
Other motor driven scrapers are described by Clark in U.S. Pat. No. 5,253,383 and Sanders et al. in U.S. Pat. No. 4,765,842. These also are relatively expensive, require the provision of batteries or connection to mains and require the ticket to be carefully fed past a rotating cleaning brush so as to completely remove the coating to fully remove the coating without damaging the symbols.
Such previous scraping utensils have not been shown in a shape or size that would serve the purpose required by the scraper. In most cases, scraping or scratching off the coating by the above devices is inconvenient. This invention describes a simple and convenient ticket scraper, specifically in a size and shape, to be used to scrape the coating off of the “scratch off” type of lottery game ticket.